Eric Ego

“Anyway, nothing much to say except that our singer is good, but manic” and I remember him bounding about a living room, pogo-style, screaming, “and after one practice session wanted to name the band after himself. He originally was gonna call himself Eric Ego, but by today the band’s name was Eric Ego. I told him, firmly but diplomatically, that there was no chance of that. Interesting character….” This Mr. Ego had some major credibility with us in that he had actually been to London, having raced over their upon punk’s outbreak. He’d even been at the giant Rock Against Racism show in Hyde Park put on by Tom Robinson (of “Glad To Be Gay”) where Jimmy Pursey sang with the Clash and stole the show. Eric worshipped Jimmy Pursey. And then the local pub band in his neighborhood had been Screwdriver, who wrote the early Oi! classics “Anti-Social” and “You’re So Dumb”, and Eric had been completely enthralled by the whole cockney oi! sensibility. We were to be the Screwdriver to his Jimmy Pursey—I even seem to vaguely recall his plans to take us back to London—to New York anyway. There were flickers of Ian Stuart’s later fascist leanings even then, but I think Eric embraced them as well…that is what happens to former Bowiephiliac Ezra Pound freaks when they wallowed in punk. He left—I think I had to kick him out—and last I heard he had abandoned punk, married some Italian dame of some ancient but faded lineage, had a child or two and lived out some horrible European art film of an existence in the cultural backwater of Trieste. I guess the bottle nearly killed him in the end. Hard to believe he was just kid from Stockton, California.

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My latest writing at: Brick's Picks

If Kubrick had died a year or two earlier he never would have made Eyes Wide Shut and his legacy would have been untarnished by such a mediocre flick. Not to mention the dirty old man as director ickiness about the whole thing. And the dialogue, sheesh. Only Pollack sounds like he not acting, and […]

Listening to Steaming Coils lost masterpiece Breaded–the record, I don’t think it ever came out on CD–and digging Brad Laner’s drums. Way loose, loopy, groovy, just the right pops and splashes, splattery press rolls and punchy bass drum kicked loud under crashing cymbals. It’s all so gloriously unmechanical and organic, and the only other drummer […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Politics

As the NRA has been so successful at getting NRA true believers elected in red states and red districts, arming teachers has been the position of probably most Republicans in Congress for years, certainly in the House anyway. And Lapierre’s crazed speech today at CPAC was aimed at the NRA membership, to get them fired […]

I gotta admit that being epileptic I would never have a gun in the house, just as a matter of course. Legally, though, I could buy a gun just like any non-epileptic. It’s not like getting a driver’s license. I was allowed to keep my license but had to go through a year long probationary […]

My latest writing at: Brick's History

(Written in 2016 and never posted.) Never heard of this before, a simulated violent Nazi takeover of Winnipeg, Canada on a wintry February day in 1942. If Day, they called it, and no one had to explain what the if meant. The Axis powers were winning the war in February of 1942–indeed, they had yet […]

There are, as far as I can tell, two ways of saying Los Angeles in L.A. anymore. The English pronunciation, with a soft G (that is, a J) and ending like an ess (and the stress on the first syllable of Angeles). Los ANjeless. And the Spanish pronunciation, with the aspirated G (sort of like […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Science

It seems that 70,000 years ago the global population of homo sapiens was reduced to less than 26,000. Apparently they teased out that bit of info through some genetic analysis. As humans were by then in Africa and across much of Eurasia, that means we were very sparse on the ground. All seven billion of […]

My latest writing at: Brick's Brain

Had the brilliant idea of taking the nighttime dose of my seizure drugs earlier and it’s totally messed up my sleep cycle. Apparently when you hit sixty your body rejects any change just out of spite. Get off my lawn, it’s yelling at me. Probably a Trump supporter, too. Anyway, going to bed again. I […]

A pair of very dear friends, unbeknownst to each other, both pressed on me the idea that these little Facebook and Twitter utterances of mine ought to be preserved. So, after lots of hesitation, I scoured my social media postings for things that qualify as pieces and transferred them to my blog and posterity. Dozens […]